Is the Head of the IMF a Sex Criminal?

This man can afford to buy his own private plane to take him somewhere...without travel documents..and, if that plane lands on French soil, what makes you think the French will extradite him?

The New York Times
May 17, 2011
Hotel Keycard of I.M.F. Chief May Tell a Tale
By JIM DWYER

Under siege by thieves who regularly got their hands on old-fashioned room keys, hotels in New York began using electronic locks on their doors in 1977, led by the fabled, fusty Algonquin. The new keys would be plastic, with a magnetic strip swiped through a card reader on the door.

They would leave an electronic trail, stamped with the times that a door opened, closed or was left ajar.

It is likely that this technology will provide an informative record of traffic in and out of the suite at the Sofitel Hotel where a 32-year-old housekeeper, a widowed immigrant and mother, encountered Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund..

Since Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on charges of sexual assault, his allies have been busy inflating trial balloons. Benjamin Brafman, a lawyer for Mr. Strauss-Kahn, declared that the evidence was “not consistent with forcible encounter” — inviting, inevitably, the suggestion that no force was evident because none was required. Mr. Brafman thus walked up to the edge of the cliff but did not quite say there had been consensual sex.

As Mr. Strauss-Kahn surely knows from his far-flung travels, the hotels of the world are cleaned by immigrants, most of them women. The women’s vulnerabilities are legion, and in many countries, hoteliers have adopted a raft of precautions to protect staffs and guests.

For example, if a male guest calls for service, the housekeeping department will send up a male attendant.

“Oftentimes, male guests will order the pay-per-view adult movies, and then call for towels, perhaps hoping that a woman will be sent to bring them up,” said Peter M. Krauss, chief sales and marketing officer for Plasticard Locktech International of Asheville, N.C., which provides card keys to hotels. “So whenever they can, the hotels will send up a male if the call comes from a male guest.”

Another policy, he said, is housekeepers do not work behind closed doors.

“With a Sofitel, their standards would dictate the door was either open, or at a minimum, ajar, when housekeeping is in the room,” Mr. Krauss said. This is a practice at virtually all hotels, he said, and can be done with a latch or by leaving a cart in the doorway.

The authorities have said that the housekeeper at the Sofitel knocked on the door to Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s suite, called out to announce herself, used her master keycard to open the door, and left the work cart in the doorway, keeping it open.

“They would have a record of her using the key to gain access,” Mr. Krauss said. “They should have a record of the door remaining open for X period of time, and the door lock being actuated again. The system can differentiate between the guest’s card key and the housekeeper’s master key.”

Inside the suite, the authorities said, the housekeeper entered the bedroom to clean and Mr. Strauss-Kahn then emerged naked from a bathroom and began to attack her. When the woman ran for the door, it is charged, Mr. Strauss-Kahn shut it, an act of unlawful imprisonment.

“They know what time the maid opened that door, propped open that door, and when someone closed that door,” Mr. Krauss said.

If the defense for Mr. Strauss-Kahn maintains that the encounter was consensual, its version will have to accommodate the unambiguous computer record of her leaving the door propped open. It will also have to explain how and when she decided that sex with Mr. Strauss-Kahn was a better use of her time than changing the linens.

The news from France is that many are appalled that Mr. Strauss-Kahn was paraded on the classic perp walk, so he could be photographed in handcuffs. The custom is indisputably unfair to people charged with crimes. The only thing comparable in France might take place annually in Cannes.

Year after year, the director Roman Polanski strolled the red carpet, smiling for the cameras, apparently unworried — and rightly so — that the French authorities would notice that he was a fugitive from justice in Los Angeles, where he had drugged, raped and sodomized a 13-year-old girl. The parallel was striking, a prosecutor said Monday. Mr. Polanski, who took his version of the perp walk as a guilty man, lowered the odds that Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who took his while presumed innocent, will get bail in New York any time soon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/nyregion/strauss-kahns-hotel-key-may-tell-tale-in-sex-case.html?hp

This suggests another way evidence might be gathered.

For example, if a male guest calls for service, the housekeeping department will send up a male attendant.

THE ROVING EYE
Sex, power and American justice
By Pepe Escobar

So Osama bin Laden won't be the main character in the trial of the century after all; by a simple twist of fate, that role will be played by Dominique Strauss-Khan (DSK), the all-powerful head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), now languishing at "Alcatraz" Rikers Island in New York.

The fact that this acronym soup has just been auditioning, despite himself, to the world-famous New York Police Department, complete with the last-minute snatch in the first class cabin of a trans-Atlantic flight, police line up and perp walk, makes it the ultimate sociopolitical global scandal.

On a nastier, New York tabloid level, it was hard to escape thescintillating metaphor of the IMF - with its reputation for screwing the world's poor - literally applying a structural adjustment in a Manhattan hotel suite to a discreet African Muslim immigrant widow who lives in the Bronx with her teenage daughter. The merciless media execution had to be as massive as the event itself.

Arguably, DSK is luckier than Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, because he'll be facing a New York jury and not the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. Unlike Gaddafi, DSK - at least in theory - is innocent until proven guilty, although he has already been convicted by the gutter press.

Less visible on both sides of the Atlantic have been sane intellects pointing out that Wall Street crooks swindling average people out of trillions of dollars; BP executives destroying the Gulf of Mexico; and as a matter of fact the George W Bush administration bankrupting the US by launching a war that killed over 1 million Iraqi civilians - none of them were slapped with a perp walk.

That much is established; as far as "American justice" is concerned, the chances of seeing Bush administration or Goldman Sachs perpetrators in handcuffs are zero.

Making whoopee
To follow in detail the media hysteria on both sides of the Atlantic has been more fascinating than a trip to Mars. In France, it was all but certain that DSK would become the next president in the 2012 elections, beating sagging neo-Napoleonic liberator of Libya Nicolas Sarkozy. DSK - the weapon of choice of the financial powers behind the throne - was about to announce his candidacy this month.

The overall tone of French mainstream media - by the way largely subservient to Sarkozy and his minions - is that the Americans, confirming all existing anti-French stereotyping, humiliated the country by parading a handcuffed DSK in a perp walk (illegal in France) and refusing his US$1 million bail.

American justice, Law and Order-style, is being dragged into the mud as much as American Puritanism. Meanwhile, among catatonic sympathizers of the Socialist Party, conspiracy theories inevitably swirl.

At least most of France apparently has established that the Sofitel chambermaid from Guinea was not a Mata Hari. But maybe she is a Central Intelligence Agency agent. Then there's the nagging twitter - amplified by a Sarkozy minion - announcing DSK had been "arrested" even before the New York police uttered a peep; a worldwide scoop. No less than 57% of French voters and 70% of socialists believe DSK was framed.

Cui bono - in case of a conspiracy? Certainly Sarkozy benefits, his presidential re-election campaign and his ultra-conservative American connections; the neo-fascists of the National Front in France, whose candidate, the businesslike Marine Le Pen, stands a greater chance of getting to the second round in 2012; and global financial sharks unhappy with the more "liberalizing" IMF stance under DSK.

Ultra-charismatic DSK is a suave Moet & Chandon socialist. If he were a bank, DSK would be in the "too big to fail" category. He did fail - but not as a bank.

If he were an American politician, he would be like former president Bill Clinton - penchant for making whoopee included. "Bubba" was almost booted out of supreme power by a gang of rabid puritans for a mere blowjob in the White House. The Paris cocktail circuit simply cannot fathom that notorious womanizer DSK would be foolish enough to risk a presidency for a French-speaking African Muslim housekeeper.

Thus the thesis that this was all a misunderstanding; DSK was waiting for a high-class New York call girl when the unsuspecting chambermaid entered the lion's den and found the lion fully armed.
This close encounter between the IMF and a sub-Saharan African developing economy does not imply that DSK is a champion of the poor, or the working class. Far from being a socialist, DSK has been a prime companion of the global financial elites and multinational capital. But there was a very interesting twist to it.

The sorriest aspect of the whole sordid affair is that DSK was really trying to reform the IMF - turning the unrepresentative behemoth towards a more progressive line. He was widely praised as a top manager. His interim successor is American John Lipsky - a former vice president at JP Morgan; talk about a regression.

DSK was trying to steer the IMF away from its nefarious role during the Asian financial crisis. At that time in 1997, the IMF's harsh US Treasury Department-inspired medicine, immensely profitable to creditors, almost destroyed whole economies, from Thailand to Indonesia. Brazil and Russia also suffered.

Then it was time to "tame" Argentina - but Argentina defaulted in late 2001. The IMF did everything possible to sabotage the country; but Argentina's economy stabilized and the country started to grow again in 2002.

Emerging markets are fed up with the IMF being led by a European. A Frenchman has run the IMF for 26 out of the past 33 years. The distribution of power is Medieval; there are nine Europeans among the 24 directors; the Brazilian director represents nine countries, but his vote weighs only 2.4%; the US vote counts four-fold.

Those 24 executive directors now will choose the next IMF head. The Europeans are already involved in a vicious catfight - they don't want to surrender the prize. Prospects anyway are bright for Kemal Dervis from Turkey, or candidates from India and South Africa.

China is still weighing whether to enter the ring. Were DSK's demise to open the door for an emerging economy leader of the IMF, what spectacular poetic justice, that it will be thanks to an African Muslim immigrant woman.

Hey Bill? Got any idea how many illegals enter the US in an average day? The Rio Grande runs two ways if you get my drift, and passports are not part of the scheme. Keep making up theories. You're doing just swell.

Emerging markets are fed up with the IMF being led by a European. A Frenchman has run the IMF for 26 out of the past 33 years. The distribution of power is Medieval; there are nine Europeans among the 24 directors; the Brazilian director represents nine countries, but his vote weighs only 2.4%; the US vote counts four-fold.

The ones who placed the gold into the IMF are the ones who will keep ruling the IMF.

First as a male I am not going to allow any woman to have her teeth around my penis in such a situation.

Under those conditions DSK should had been in need of medical attention not having lunch with his daughter.

The guy attacked an innocent woman in a foreign country

defending this guy before he's even been to trial

What he did was horrible - attacking an unknown, innocent woman so he could satisfy his urges

The simple fact is, he lives in a country where this is acceptable, where his behaviour is legion (or legend), and he tried it on in a country where it is NOT acceptable. Ergo, he is STUPID and caused this **** himself - not one other person is to blame. She didn't attack him. He attacked her.

My first thought when I found out that she is muslim yesterday, after I had seen a French TV online poll that had over 60% thinking that DSK was set up by his French foes, what that if I were given the job to make a sting happen I would pick a very sexy young black woman from Ghana, who claims to be a devout Muslim as the pigeon.